Thursday, August 30, 2018

"McCain graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1958 and was commissioned into the United States Navy. He became a naval aviator and flew ground-attack aircraft from aircraft carriers.

During the Vietnam War, he was almost killed in the 1967 USS Forrestal fire. While on a bombing mission during Operation Rolling Thunder over Hanoi in October 1967, he was shot down, seriously injured, and captured by the North Vietnamese. He was a prisoner of war until 1973.

He experienced episodes of torture and refused an out-of-sequence early repatriation offer. The wounds that he sustained during the war left him with lifelong physical disabilities. He retired from the Navy as a captain in 1981 and moved to Arizona, where he entered politics.

In 1982, he was elected to the United States House of Representatives, where he served two terms. He entered the U.S. Senate in 1987 and easily won reelection five times, the final time in 2016." ::Wikipedia::

I.

He certainly must have felt like a god while soaring through the sky like a god and dropping bombs on the people below.

an evil god.

An actual, real life Iron Man– that is pretty crazy to think about– like fifty years ago, but instead of fighting some terrible villain, he finds one of the world's poorest, most backwater countries where no one speaks English, and just starts blasting farmers and burning the entire forest to the ground, for real, and saying that's what they get for electing a communist government.

After we elected Lyndon B Johnson.

II.

Pop quiz: What could you do to a man who was going around dropping bombs on your neighborhood?

III.

And Vietnam's just lucky we didn't elect Barry Goldwater, who was talking about nuking them:

Senator Barry Goldwater (R-Arizona), running for the Republican Party nomination in the upcoming presidential election, gives an interview in which he discusses the use of low-yield atomic bombs in North Vietnam to defoliate forests and destroy bridges, roads, and railroad lines bringing supplies from communist China. During the storm of criticism that followed, Goldwater tried to back away from these drastic actions, claiming that he did not mean to advocate the use of atomic bombs but was “repeating a suggestion made by competent military people.” Democrats painted Goldwater as a warmonger who was overly eager to use nuclear weapons in Vietnam. Though he won his party’s nomination, Goldwater was never able to shake his image as an extremist in Vietnam policies. This image was a key factor in his crushing defeat by opponent Lyndon B. Johnson, who took about 61 percent of the vote to Goldwater’s 39 percent. ::History.com::

Justin: Doug, how will wars of the future be fought differently than today?

Doug: War’s evolving in several ways. For starters, we won’t see as many nation states fighting each other. There will, instead, be more conflict between nation states and non-state entities like so-called terrorist organizations.

Over the last 30 or so years terrorism has become a buzzword, supposedly one of the greatest evils of our era. But “terrorism” is simply a method of warfare. So you can’t fight terrorism. It’s like saying you can fight artillery barrages, cavalry charges or frontal assaults. Terrorism isn’t a thing, it’s a tactic.

Terrorism is essentially a form of psychological warfare, intended to sway the minds of the enemy. As such, it’s much cheaper, much less destructive, and potentially much more effective than conventional warfare. As Napoleon said, in war the moral is to the physical as three is to one.

I should also mention Sun Tzu in this light. He’s become very fashionable in recent years. This isn’t the time to discuss his views on warfare, but there’s no question he would have been a huge advocate of terror as a method.

Add another 400,000 maimed and an additional 500,000 gruesome birth defects chalked up to the use of Agent Orange, and you start to get a sense of the scale of civilian suffering caused by our invasion of Indochina.

I bring this up because the McCain view of what happened there — that we “lost” in Vietnam only because we were “limited” to, say, 2 million tons of bombs and 580,000 air missions in places like Laos — continues to this day to be a mainstream belief.

VII.

eBay's football ad on this makes it so special

"Abstract

Most people are caring and will exert great effort to rescue individual victims whose needy plight comes to their attention. These same good people, however, often become numbly indifferent to the plight of individuals who are "one of many" in a much greater problem.

Why does this occur? The answer to this question will help us answer a related question that is the topic of this paper: Why, over the past century, have good people repeatedly ignored mass murder and genocide?

Every episode of mass murder is unique and raises unique obstacles to intervention. But the repetitiveness of such atrocities, ignored by powerful people and nations, and by the general public, calls for explanations that may reflect some fundamental deficiency in our humanity - a deficiency that, once identified, might possibly be overcome. One fundamental mechanism that may play a role in many, if not all, episodes of mass-murder neglect involves the capacity to experience affect, the positive and negative feelings that combine with reasoned analysis to guide our judgments, decisions, and actions.

I shall draw from psychological research to show how the statistics of mass murder or genocide, no matter how large the numbers, fail to convey the true meaning of such atrocities. The reported numbers of deaths represent dry statistics, "human beings with the tears dried off," that fail to spark emotion or feeling and thus fail to motivate action.

Recognizing that we cannot rely only upon our moral feelings to motivate proper action against genocide, we must look to moral argument and international law. The 1948 Genocide Convention was supposed to meet this need, but it has not been effective.

I'm amazed, but not surprised at the American people's entirely misplaced sense of decorum at this hour.

When Charles Manson died no one had a word to say against any one who celebrated as they pointed out the obvious about him– that he was a menace to the world, who ordered people under his spell to carry out murders in cold blood.

The only difference between Charles Manson and John McCain is the sheer scale of the mayhem and murder orchestrated by the U.S. Senator from Arizona, who just like Manson, ordered people under his spell to carry out murders in cold blood.

The unambiguous agenda of the United States is perpetual violent conflict and war, with a staggering human cost. And John McCain has made a career out of being one of its most extreme advocates for that agenda, at the vanguard of the most extreme militant wing of an extremely militant regime.

In the West we have a superstition against speaking ill of the dead– De mortuis nihil nisi bonum– Of the dead say nothing but good. Remember, it's a superstition. In an essay regarding the horrors of World War I that had devastated his continent, Sigmund Freud had this to say of the old Roman superstition:

"We assume a special attitude towards the dead, something almost like admiration for one who has accomplished a very difficult feat. We suspend criticism of him, overlooking whatever wrongs he may have done, and issue the command, De mortuis nil nisi bene: we act as if we were justified in singing his praises at the funeral oration, and inscribe only what is to his advantage on the tombstone. This consideration for the dead, which he really no longer needs, is more important to us than the truth, and, to most of us, certainly, it is more important than consideration for the living."

Indeed for most it is.

The white knights coming to John McCain's defense at this moment– those second rate peddlers of war propaganda, and of course the outrage mongers and virtue signalers– they accuse someone who speaks as I do of lacking decency, compassion, and humanity. "What about the grieving families!" they cry as they beat their breasts in a sickly tone of fevered sanctimony.

A friend of mine asked me, "Would you want people celebrating your death, Wesley? Have some human decency." I was amazed at his ability to willfully ignore the context. "Would you want people planning yours? Where's your human decency?" I asked in return.

Where is the love and consideration in their hearts– the decency, compassion, and humanity– for the many innocent dead around the world, ordered to be massacred, and slated for death by John McCain and his ilk? How can honoring such a man be a sign of decency and compassion? There are many still grieving their loss, missing their dead family members, murdered in acts of cold blood at the command of John McCain and so many, too many others like him in the United States government.

If you have the stomach for it, Google "deformed Iraqi babies," and look at them. They were born that way because of the radioactive depleted uranium shells left all over Iraq by the U.S. Department of Defense, the fruits of John McCain's life's work.

Only in a lunatic society can honoring such a man be a sign of decency, while condemning the sum of his life's work is regarded as callous. Only with a social psyche marred by the pernicious effects of political propaganda, could this be possible.

George Orwell rightly said, "Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable."

Dare point out– as the uncorrupted child in the old Danish tale– that the emperor has no clothes, and people will be so embarrassed by the enormity of the lies our political system is based on, so afraid that they are unable to accept such a disheartening truth, to believe that so many "respectable" men could do so much evil and base it on such preposterous lies, that they will attack the one who points out the obvious in a spectacular display of enraged fake conviction.

But what would you do if you woke up last November and found the majority of society speaking in tones of great respect, honor, and admiration for Charles Manson at the hour of his death?

I would tell them to stop acting like lunatics. And warn them that we will have hell to pay if they can't stop.

And why has the rest of America never come to terms with the defining crimes of our age?

By Matt Taibbi

McCain was not, generally speaking, a man of strong beliefs. One of the most honest things he ever said was that he didn’t run for president to enact reforms or out of some “grand sense of patriotism,” but simply because “it had become my ambition to be president.” If anything, he often seemed bored by domestic issues, and was even famous after a fashion for “reaching across the aisle” on matters like campaign finance.

But he did have one unshakeable conviction: Wherever America had a foreign policy problem, the solution was always to bomb the fuck out of someone.

Long before he became a symbol of anti-Trumpism (despite having contributed significantly to the Trump phenomenon by unleashing Sarah Palin on national politics in 2008), McCain defied the mainstream GOP to support Bill Clinton’s air strikes in Kosovo. McCain wanted to go even further to a ground invasion, if necessary.

People forget, but it was this episode that first elevated McCain to media-icon status as an elected official. “We’ve turned down more than we’ve accepted,” he said in 1999, speaking about interview requests. “Five times as much.”

From that point on, he was the torchbearer for the purest bipartisan value that exists in Washington: military interventionism. He never saw an invasion he didn’t support, and it’s sadly fitting that the last piece of legislation to bear his name was a massive military spending hike that scored the rare trifecta of support from mainstream Democrats, Republicans and Donald Trump.

We leave smoldering ash-piles around the world, and instead of wondering why we’re hated in those places, we keep thinking it’s football and we’ll just call the right plays the next game. “We’ll get ‘em next time” became our official foreign policy, and McCain was long ago elevated as chief spokesperson.

McCain never changed his mind about Vietnam, in particular, and it colored his opinion of every war that followed. Here’s what McCain wrote in 2003, months into the invasion of Iraq:

We lost in Vietnam because we lost the will to fight, because we did not understand the nature of the war we were fighting and because we limited the tools at our disposal.

McCain added that Iraqis had less chance to “win” because they “do not enjoy the kind of sanctuary North Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos provided.”

Between 1963 and 1974, we dropped two million tons of ordnance on Laos — not North Vietnam, but Laos — which works out to “a planeload of bombs every eight minutes, 24 hours per day, for nine years.”

Add another 400,000 maimed and an additional 500,000 gruesome birth defects chalked up to the use of Agent Orange, and you start to get a sense of the scale of civilian suffering caused by our invasion of Indochina.

I bring this up because the McCain view of what happened there — that we “lost” in Vietnam only because we were “limited” to, say, 2 million tons of bombs and 580,000 air missions in places like Laos — continues to this day to be a mainstream belief.

That concept represents one side of the acceptable spectrum of opinion, in which the Ann Coulters of the world insist we are only ever held back by liberals and reporters and other such traitors, who were/are “rooting for the enemy.”

I've seen all the ways over the years in which the government in Washington violates its own charter, the U.S. Constitution, and hardly even tries to keep up appearances anymore that it is even trying to follow its own laws.

I've seen all the ways in which state and local governments steal money from their states' economies and waste resources.

And I've seen how both parties actively participate in this corruption, and how the two main parties are far more alike than they are different, how they are both privileged participants in a system controlled by entrenched special interests, how taken together, their activities closely resemble the one party rule of repressive foreign governments, and how fierce, bitter partisanship disguises this reality behind a loud facade of perpetual fake conflict.

That's why I'm an independent voter.

And that's why I cast a ballot for Gary Johnson for President of the United States, a vote of conscience for a candidate outside the corrupt two-party establishment. And although I am not a member of the LP, and don't see myself ever joining with any political party, everything I've seen happen under Obama's second term and Trump's first term has validated my inherent skepticism of anybody beholden to one of the two major parties.

So imagine my sore vexation at Nick Gillespie of Reason Magazine's interview earlier this year with Gary Johnson, in which this libertarian magazine can't help itself but lead with the stale Aleppo story.

At the time this interview was conducted, it had been 18 months since that MSNBC interview and 15 months since that election, and today people still heckle "Aleppo!" on every thread about Gary Johnson. Why is anybody still harping on Aleppo at all and why an ostensibly friendly libertarian magazine?

Yeah well in 2016 the hopelessly establishmentarian and sycophantic mainstream media decided by the time they were finished, people were going to wonder whether Aleppo is Gary Johnson's middle name. And a bunch of foolish– maybe perversely self-destructive– libertarians would happily allow themselves to be recruited to the establishment's campaign to tattoo Aleppo to Gary Johnson.

I never want to hear about Aleppo again.

So let's have a final conversation about it:

Gary Johnson was castigated by establishmentarians and libertarians alike for not knowing Aleppo is the largest city in Syria in a September 2016 MSNBC interview, in which some remarkably forgettable talking head asks him:

"What would you do if you were elected, about Aleppo?" Johnson replies, "And what is Aleppo?" to which the talking head feigns incredulity, "You're kidding... Aleppo is in Syria. It's the epicenter of the refuge crisis..."

The show's host, Joe Scarborough, then tells us all what to think about this exchange, and it seems like everybody listened to him unquestioningly except for me:

"So Aleppo is the center of a lot of people's concerns across the planet about the terrible humanitarian crisis that's unfolding, not only in Syria, but especially in Aleppo. You asked what is Aleppo. Do you really think that foreign policy is so insignificant that somebody running for president of the United States shouldn't even know what Aleppo is? Where Aleppo is? Why Aleppo is so important?"

Okay Joe, Aleppo's not "so important." And only in a United States that has become a global empire instead of a constitutional republic would a civil war in a small country halfway around the world be so important to the government of the United States.

Our Constitution does not give our government the authority to be the world's police, our people are not and have never been interested in being the world's police, and policing the world and maintaining global military-monetary hegemony has been a rotten deal for most Americans while enriching a few at the cost of vast amounts of American treasure and blood.

And that's exactly the answer that Gary Johnson gave, so whether he knew the name of a city in a tiny war torn third world country or not, Aleppo was Gary Johnson's brightest shining moment in the campaign, the one in which he advocated for a wise, prudent, and constitutional foreign policy, unlike the strong continuity signals we were getting from Hillary Clinton.

Or the deliberately vague and contradictory answers we were getting from Donald Trump, which turned out– predictably enough– to be cover for him to swing full neocon as president and give the military industrial complex and deep state nearly everything they want short of regime change in Iran.

But since people– even libertarians– can't seem to give up on the idea that not knowing the name of the city of Aleppo somehow made Gary Johnson look like an unserious presidential candidate, let's review just how stupid that really is.

Aside from the problem with caring about random trivia more than substantive principles, it's clear that every desk jockey typing in his scorn for Gary Johnson after looking up Aleppo on Wikipedia so they could pretend they knew what it was the next day, hasn't even been paying close enough attention to world politics themselves to remember this is a game the media has been playing with presidential candidates for a long time.

Some smart-ass journalist in 1999 asked George W. Bush to name the presidents of four foreign countries, knowing he wouldn't be able to name any of them (because who would?), and when Bush was only able to name one, the mainstream media gleefully went: "Gotchya!"

'Texas Gov. George W. Bush was hit with a surprise quiz on foreign affairs and scored only 25 percent.

The Republican presidential front-runner sat down Wednesday with WHDH-TV, the NBC affiliate in Boston, and was asked to name the leaders of four current world hot spots: Chechnya, Taiwan, India and Pakistan.

He was able to give a partial response to just one: Taiwan.

That drew immediate criticism from the camp of Democrat Al Gore, which said the vice president could have answered all four correctly.

"I guess we know that 'C' at Yale was a gentleman's 'C,'" said Gore spokesman Chris Lehane, referring to the way Bush has described his academic record.

The Bush campaign brushed off the incident.

"The person who is running for president is seeking to be the leader of the free world, not a Jeopardy contestant," said Karen Hughes, Bush communications director.

"I would venture to guess that 99.9 percent of most Americans and probably most candidates could not answer who is the president of Chechnya," Hughes added.'

No one believed that this gotchya question really disqualified Bush as a serious presidential candidate. And as it turned out, Bush was widely praised in the years after 9-11 for cultivating a close working relationship with one of those foreign leaders he couldn't name, Gen. Pervaiz Musharraf of Pakistan.

So what mattered was not being a walking encyclopedia, but having a good executive skill set, a quality that no one can deny Gary Johnson has in abundance.

The mainstream media played the same game with Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin in 2008 when ABC's Charlie Gibson asked her: "Do you agree with the Bush doctrine?"

And despite the fact that virtually no one, even in political journalism– which I was following obsessively at the time– much less in common parlance, was referring to pre-emptive war as The Bush Doctrine (they were calling it "pre-emption"), people all pretended the next day that Sarah Palin was alarmingly ignorant for tripping over Gibson's likely deliberately obscure usage.

This isn't what good faith conversation looks like. This isn't how we earnestly investigate someone's credentials. It's just laying sophistry-based traps that look dramatic on television to shallow-minded people who have already made up their hearts and minds to shout and boo down everybody but their own "team."

In a press release Tuesday, the Tea Party Senator from Kentucky, and relentless thorn in the side of establishment Republicans and Democrats, announced he is endorsing the Libertarian Party candidate in New Mexico's 2018 Senate contest:

"I have an important announcement today. I'm endorsing Gary Johnson for US Senate.

Gary Johnson is a true fiscal conservative. As Governor, he reduced the size of government while improving services. He cut taxes, and he set what may be a record by vetoing more than 700 unnecessary pieces of legislation.

His leadership on issues of government overreach, protecting Americans’ Fourth Amendment rights against mass surveillance, and common sense foreign policy is sorely needed in the United States Senate, for New Mexico and the nation.

Monday, August 27, 2018

"The real question you have to ask, is why do I get the most money from Active Duty Officers? Military personnel?"

It's true, Ron Paul raised more money from active duty military members than any other presidential candidate in either party that election, and his top three contributors were:

The U.S. Army, U.S. Navy, and U.S. Airforce.

I love the talking heads with Ron Paul in this like a reality television show or a mockumentary. This is amazing.

Lol at the way Ron Paul looks at John McCain when the warguy calls him an isolationist, like "Oh no, you did not just play yourself like that, son!"

Savage:"He's approaching it emotionally. He has so much invested in the war he's invested in. He has a misunderstanding of foreign policy. I don't think he has the vaguest idea about what the Founders taught– how beneficial it is to have a non-interventionist foreign policy. He uses the cliche of isolationism, and that is not what it is. And he really hasn't studied on all the blowback that the CIA has taught us and that we have suffered from."

Crypto could be closer to the mainstream than we think

Right now, it might feel like we’re a long way off from a world where crypto is mainstream.

However, the industry has come a long way within the past two years alone. With more and more companies working on solutions to solve some of crypto’s biggest problems and making it more practical for real-world application, it could be closer than we’ve been led to believe.

There have even been rumors that big companies like Amazon are planning on jumping onto the crypto bandwagon. The retail giant has released no official statements on the topic, but its recent purchases of domain names including AmazonEthereum.com, AmazonCryptocurrency.com, and AmazonCryptocurrencies.com, suggest that it could be gearing up to become more involved in this growing industry.

Amazon is also pushing its ‘Blockchain on AWS’ platform that provides users with the resources they need to experiment with blockchain networks and deploy solutions. Qtum is an example of one blockchain platform that has recently become available through Amazon Web Services (AWS). Qtum is a decentralized, open source smart contracts platform that aims to completely revolutionize the way that smart contracts are viewed, developed, and used.

This launch will enable AWS users to access the platform and use it to develop and launch their own smart contracts by using Amazon Machine Image (AMI), without having to go outside of the platform.

Having Qtum available on the Amazon platform has already served as a huge boost for the QTUM cryptocurrency. And this is just the beginning. Over the next few years, it’s likely that Amazon will become increasingly interested in the potential of the blockchain.

Who knows...within a few years, buying a loaf of bread with Bitcoin could be the new norm.

"Arran Stewart, Co-owner and CVO of Job.com, explains how Bitcoin could replace credit cards. Credit cards, he says, could be replaced with simple wallet verification that could be confirmed 'with something as simple as a fingerprint. We are already used to doing the same and similar behavior with Apple Pay. This is far more secure and efficient as it would allow retailers to receive payment for goods and services much faster. The only roadblock to this becoming reality is the stability of the crypto market, which will come in time and as transaction volumes continue to increase.'

That’s bad news for companies like Visa and Master Card, which dominate the credit card payment industry -- and for the banks that issue these cards and take their own cut.

But it is good news for Bitcoin investors, as it will raise exponentially the adoption rates for day to day transactions, and boost its price."

"As a store of value, there is some real traction [with Bitcoin], and actually as we’re seeing in countries like Turkey that are having significant economic crisis — where people are losing faith in the Turkish lira — we’re going to see money move over to bitcoin because as unstable as it is, it is actually a lot more stable for a lot of people than their own [currency]... But right now, we’re still in the earliest, earliest stages."

Sunday, August 26, 2018

I'm amazed, but not surprised at the American people's entirely misplaced sense of decorum at this hour.

When Charles Manson died no one had a word to say against any one who celebrated as they pointed out the obvious about him– that he was a menace to the world, who ordered people under his spell to carry out murders in cold blood.

The only difference between Charles Manson and John McCain is the sheer scale of the mayhem and murder orchestrated by the U.S. Senator from Arizona, who just like Manson, ordered people under his spell to carry out murders in cold blood.

The unambiguous agenda of the United States is perpetual violent conflict and war, with a staggering human cost. And John McCain has made a career out of being one of its most extreme advocates for that agenda, at the vanguard of the most extreme militant wing of an extremely militant regime.

In the West we have a superstition against speaking ill of the dead– De mortuis nihil nisi bonum– Of the dead say nothing but good. Remember, it's a superstition. In an essay regarding the horrors of World War I that had devastated his continent, Sigmund Freud had this to say of the old Roman superstition:

"We assume a special attitude towards the dead, something almost like admiration for one who has accomplished a very difficult feat. We suspend criticism of him, overlooking whatever wrongs he may have done, and issue the command, De mortuis nil nisi bene: we act as if we were justified in singing his praises at the funeral oration, and inscribe only what is to his advantage on the tombstone. This consideration for the dead, which he really no longer needs, is more important to us than the truth, and, to most of us, certainly, it is more important than consideration for the living."

Indeed for most it is.

The white knights coming to John McCain's defense at this moment– those second rate peddlers of war propaganda, and of course the outrage mongers and virtue signalers– they accuse someone who speaks as I do of lacking decency, compassion, and humanity. "What about the grieving families!" they cry as they beat their breasts in a sickly tone of fevered sanctimony.

A friend of mine asked me, "Would you want people celebrating your death, Wesley? Have some human decency." I was amazed at his ability to willfully ignore the context. "Would you want people planning yours? Where's your human decency?" I asked in return.

Where is the love and consideration in their hearts– the decency, compassion, and humanity– for the many innocent dead around the world, ordered to be massacred, and slated for death by John McCain and his ilk? How can honoring such a man be a sign of decency and compassion? There are many still grieving their loss, missing their dead family members, murdered in acts of cold blood at the command of John McCain and so many, too many others like him in the United States government.

If you have the stomach for it, Google "deformed Iraqi babies," and look at them. They were born that way because of the radioactive depleted uranium shells left all over Iraq by the U.S. Department of Defense, the fruits of John McCain's life's work.

Only in a lunatic society can honoring such a man be a sign of decency, while condemning the sum of his life's work is regarded as callous. Only with a social psyche marred by the pernicious effects of political propaganda, could this be possible.

George Orwell rightly said, "Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable."

Dare point out– as the uncorrupted child in the old Danish tale– that the emperor has no clothes, and people will be so embarrassed by the enormity of the lies our political system is based on, so afraid that they are unable to accept such a disheartening truth, to believe that so many "respectable" men could do so much evil and base it on such preposterous lies, that they will attack the one who points out the obvious in a spectacular display of enraged fake conviction.

But what would you do if you woke up last November and found the majority of society speaking in tones of great respect, honor, and admiration for Charles Manson at the hour of his death?

Saturday, August 25, 2018

Cody's raising funds to fight the multiple lawsuits filed against him by several powerful state attorneys general for exercising his First Amendment rights and helping you exercise your Second Amendment rights.

Friday, August 24, 2018

Did you know that in America you are 8 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist?

Seriously. That bizarre and unsettling fact is based on statistics from a 2004 National Safety Council report, the National Center for Health Statistics, the U.S. Census Bureau, and 2003 mortality data from the Center for Disease Control.

Completely unwarranted, unjustified, and often deadly police violence against the American people is an epidemic of absurd proportions. It's an absolute scandal how bad it is. I probably follow a lot more political groups and pages than the average person, and I almost can't scroll through my streams without seeing video of another obvious act of flagrant police abuse on a weekly basis. If any other organization, or even broad group of similar organizations as in the case of police, had so many, such violent scandals so often, we would not tolerate it.

No private industry could get away with this much scandal without being sued, and fined, and prosecuted, picketed, and protested into non-existence. The reasons for the epidemic of abusive police violence are manifold, but high among them is the complete lack of liability that police officers face because of the role they play as the foot soldiers of the Just Us system, and the pervasive double standards for behavior that people have for the government over the rest of society.

Think "foot soldiers" is an overstatement or mis-characterization? Donald Trump has ramped up the unprecedented militarization of police that began under Barack Obama, selling hand me down military armament from the United States Department of Defense to state and city police departments, as well as the Nazi-as-hell-sounding Department of Homeland Security ("the homeland" is fascist terminology bro), and let's face it, the DHS wasn't put together by the U.S. in 2002 to be used against Muslim terrorists– it was designed to be used against you.

That's why the TSA, under the umbrella of the Department of Homeland Security, searches every single American who wants to get on a commercial airline, every day, in violation of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, which promises:

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

If this was a truly free country, and truly a country of laws, there wouldn't be stop and frisk happening non stop from all our airports to the streets of New York City.

But the United States has never let the Constitution stop it from doing whatever Americans will let it get away with, and the terrorists made a pretty spot on calculation that most Americans today are weak and cowardly enough to allow (and even cheer on) our government to treat all of us like we're the terrorists.

As we careen out of control toward a dystopian police state, dim witted Trump voters are driving around with Don't Tread on Me stickers on their pick up trucks right next to Blue Lives Matter stickers (which essentially says, "Please, please tread on me").

They think they're for limited government, and acted like they were worried about the police state when Obama was president, but all it took to calm their naive MAGA hat wearing asses down was to elect a socialist, ex-Democrat, former Clinton pal from New York City who cribbed all his campaign lines from Ronald Reagan.

Being pro police in an age like ours is incredibly naive. Gone are the days of kindly local police like Andy Griffith looking out for their communities. Police used to look like this:

Now they look like this:

That's straight up Galactic Empire style Stormtroopers.

These bastards are doing 20,000 no knock raids a year, just breaking into people's houses (often because they were reported to have the completely harmless leaves of an illegal plant in their possession), shooting their dogs for barking, and sometimes shooting them in their own beds as they rouse from sleep in terror, and wreaking all kinds of havoc and chaos like utter criminals.

America doesn't need this shit. To add insult to injury, we're forced to pay for the nefarious exploits of these state and local police departments as well as the federal Gestapo, out of our own earnings, money we created through our own efforts, whether we want to pay for it or not. The result is total financial crisis for many state budgets, which are buckling under the weight of the massive expenditures secured by the rent-seeking police unions.

We should just abolish the police completely and let people use their Second Amendment right to defend themselves from criminals. It's not like it will do you any good anyways to try to dial 911 while being mugged or home invaded.

Besides, even if a cop was standing right next to you while you were being mugged, they are under no legal obligation to actually protect you, and there have been notorious cases of police standing by and watching while violent crimes happen right in front of them. They even won a Supreme Court case that ruled police in America have no legal duty to protect the public.

A better solution would be private security for hire with use fees on a case by case basis, just like hailing a ride. If you feel you need private security for any reason, there should be an Uber for armed residents in your area that you can hail to stop by with their gun on their hip to make sure that you are safe. Uber itself could even created a specialized, premium service that provides this private security, called Uber Blue.

It could make sure its private police are certified in gun use and safety, have guns that meet certain requirements, and have no prior history that would make them a liability for the company. They would have to undergo far more extensive training than drivers obviously, and hailing an Uber Blue would necessarily have to cost quite a bit more than hailing a ride because of the greater liability it entails.

The net cost to society, however, would be far lower than the cost of maintaining unionized, public police departments with no liability whatsoever for the actions they take, an absolute magnets for bullies who want the ultimate power trip.

There has already been a spate of reports of people hailing Ubers to take them to the hospital instead of ambulances, and finding that the Uber gets there faster despite not being able to run all the red lights, and costs them a hell of a lot less than the ambulance. Which is why they should also offer a service called Uber White, in which all drivers are also certified in First Aid and have certain standard First Aid equipment to provide medical assistance as first responders and then get the patient to the hospital.

This is a model for how private companies and the sharing economy made possible by the mobile infrastructure can begin to replace what we thought of as services only the government could provide, with better results, responsive to the markets' needs, at a lower cost, and with liabilities to keep them from overstepping their bounds. It's time for a free market, citizen police force. The "professional" tax funded one isn't working for us.

You wouldn't notice it at all watching the mainstream television news media or reading mainstream newspapers.

For some reason they haven't been too talkative about it, but this is the ten year anniversary of the Wall Street financial crisis that struck America and the world with devastating consequences for millions of people.

What happened in 2008 wasn't an overnight phenomenon. Indeed it may be helpful not to think of it as a crisis. The crisis occurred first, over years, many years of compromises and corrupt practices in the financial industry with the complicit support of the federal government. It was during this time throughout the '90s and into the '00s that the crisis occurred. It was then that something was at stake. That something could have been done about it.

The Wall Street financial crisis was the final result, all at once, of the American political and financial system's failure to meet the crisis with moral courage, succumbing instead to complacency, cynicism, and greed. The failure of several major global financial companies at this time was the market correcting the many years of compounding interest on the pricey debt of Wall Street's unscrupulous, feckless culture.

A glimmer of things to come was already evident during the economic boom of the 90s, inaugurated as many believed, by the election of Bill Clinton to the office of the presidency, the first candidate in the history of the Democratic Party to take as much money as he did from Wall Street and turn the Democratic Party into the modern machine of corporate cronyism that it is today along with the Republican party.

The New York Stock Exchange then was marred by such infamous Wall Street hoaxes as Centennial Technologies in 1996, followed in the dawning of the Bush Era by Enron and Arthur Anderson in 2001, WorldCom and Tyco International in 2002, and HealthSouth in 2003.

This was also when algorithmic high frequency trading came into use on Wall Street to fix prices and manipulate markets, turning an already fetid marsh of financial corruption into a monstrous machine of financial deception and fraud.

Then in 2007 and 2008 the Wall Street financial crisis was in full swing with the final result of the subprime mortgage scam– big banks running away with everyone's money, ripping the bottom out of the entire global economy and devastating home owners, shareholders, and the economic prospects of an entire generation.

2008 was also the same year that Bernie Madoff made off with $18 billion worth of rich investors' money, many of them wealthy celebrities and business elites. Bernie Madoff was the chairman of the National Association of Securities Dealers. That's the largest independent regulator for the New York Stock Exchange. Its mission is "to protect investors by making sure the United States securities industry operates fairly and honestly."

So the guy in charge of protecting investors from fraud on the New York Stock Exchange was the biggest fraudster in its history. It too perfectly and painfully exemplifies the top down corruption of the American political and financial system. Many people are quick to blame unfettered capitalism and the free market for what happened, but the Wall Street financial industry is hardly an example of capitalism at work.

The American finance industry is one of the most heavily regulated sectors in the world, and there is a constantly revolving door of financial and political elites who move seamlessly back and forth between Washington and Wall Street. The free market was at work when these companies failed, when market actors evaluated them at their true worth: corrupt, fraudulent, scam, bankrupt, zero. The free market would have let them go out of business.

But Washington intervened in the economy and redistributed wealth to them and bailed them out, from a market that wouldn't have gone near these banks ever again with another investment. That's not capitalism. That's socialism, and an incredibly perverse version of it: a version that privatizes big Wall Street companies' profits, and socializes their billion dollar losses. Markets choose not to do business with companies that lose money, but Washington rewarded these companies for quite fraudulently losing their customers' money.

This was not an effort of either party in opposition to the other either. It was a bipartisan effort of the entrenched two party system. George Bush supported the TARP bailouts, and so did Nancy Pelosi. The 2008 presidential nominees of both parties, John McCain and Barack Obama, both voted for TARP as Senators while they were campaigning for president. That says a lot about who is really running the government in Washington, and it's not Main Street.

Not much has changed. Bernie Madoff went to prison for his ponzi scheme, but remember– he stole very rich people's money. Meanwhile in 2016, nearly a decade after the Wall Street financial crisis, the top campaign contributor to both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton were both Wall Street hedge funds.

There are no easy answers to such a complex problem as this one, but it's obvious that Americans can't trust the two party system in Washington to solve this for them.

So this judge in Tennessee got in big trouble last year for offering inmates in his county a 30 day reduction in their jail sentence if they volunteered for a sterilization procedure:

"When Judge Sam Benningfield of White County, Tenn., offered to shave off jail time for inmates who volunteered for sterilization, a chorus of attorneys, advocates and public officials reacted with horror."

Horror? Why?

"Benningfield said his goal was to break a 'vicious cycle' of repeat drug offenders with children. But many argued that the proposal, outlined in a May order, was nothing short of eugenics."

Psssh. What's so horrible about eugenics?

Having more physically and mentally healthy people?

Don't get me wrong, I am not supporting forced sterilization of anyone, which would be an intolerable violation of their life and liberty, but this program was completely voluntary.

No one was being threatened with 30 additional days in confinement if they didn't comply.

They were already sentenced to those 30 days for a crime they had committed. These inmates were being offered 30 days off their sentence and a free contraceptive procedure if they wanted it. They were free to say no and serve out the sentence they were already sentenced to serve out regardless.

This judge just gave inmates more options.

"Civil rights lawyers brought legal actions and a local prosecutor told his staff to avoid the judge’s program at all costs.

Now, after the wave of backlash and amid multiple lawsuits, state judicial regulators have formally reprimanded Benningfield for promising 30-day sentence reductions to inmates who agreed to receive vasectomies or birth control implants."

Everybody was worried that offering a 30 day reduction in their sentence would be unduly coercing them, but it's not coercion.

It's offering an additional incentive to get a free health care procedure that most people have to pay good money for and that Sandra Fluke wishes she could have gotten as a student at Georgetown University Law School.

Democrats mobilized to ThreatCon1 over Sandra Fluke's right to get a private university to cover her contraceptive costs, then a judge in Tennessee offers it to prison inmates for free plus reducing their sentences and everybody loses their minds.

This guy should have been like the Bernie Sanders style socialism movement's hero or something.

Maybe some of those inmates actually don't want to have any kids in the future, and would have been happy to have their sentence reduced plus free permanent contraption.

Any of them who do want to have kids were free to decline and serve out their sentence, not as a punishment for declining the sterilization procedure, but because they were already sentenced to serve those days in confinement anyway.

That doesn't look like coercion to me.

There is a clear distinction between coercive, tyrannical eugenics that violates people's liberty, and a libertarian eugenics that would actually decrease the amount of coercion and tyranny in our society while also promoting a more healthy population.

An example of the latter kind would be making voluntary sterilization a requirement to receive welfare benefits.

My argument is simple: No one is entitled to welfare benefits anyways. They are a gift of a prosperous, generous, and charitable society, and they are made possible by the world's productive people who don't need handouts.

If the recipients of social safety net programs can't or won't contribute something of value back to society, they are simply taking without giving back. They should have to do something to promote the general welfare for their own part.

And all I'm asking is that in exchange for the gift of maintaining their lives at the expense of the hard work of others for no contribution in return, they forfeit their reproductive prerogative.

Actually my argument is even more simple than that: If you can't take care of yourself, then you can't take care of children.

If in America, in the 21st century, with all the freedom and opportunity as there's ever been in the history of humanity, you're unable or unwilling to clothe, feed, and shelter yourself through your own efforts without taking from other people without giving anything in return, then it's damn near a fundamental human right for no one to have to have you for their parent.

If you accept welfare benefits, you are saying, "I am incapable of taking care of myself. I'm a grown man or woman, but I need an actual adult to take care of me." Well if you can't take care of yourself, then you can't take care of someone else, and the government should not be in the business of causing some poor child to be stuck with you as a parent by covering your welfare benefits and subsidizing you to reproduce.

You think the kind of person who takes multiple sick days every month, never shows up on time, has a terrible attitude, can't follow simple instructions, and thus can't even hold down a job at a fast food restaurant or retail chain store, will be able to take good care of a baby? If they want to have kids, no one should be allowed to forcibly stop them, but no one should pay for that horror story either, and certainly no one should be forced to pay for it.

That's especially true when you consider the ones who are being forced to pay for it have kids of their own, and the welfare state takes from those families to incentivize people who can't even take care of themselves to have children and inevitably raise them up to be as hopeless and feeble as they are. It is the explicit, codified, institutionalized sacrifice of the interests of the good, the strong, the healthy, the capable, the noble, to the bad, the weak, the sickly, the incapable, the wretched.

The result is fewer of the healthy and strong (made less healthy and less strong), and more of the sickly and weak, which was the goal all along, the means being the ends in the making– the immolation and destruction of the ideal, and the elevation of the botched– the socialist's profoundly unnatural and perverted loathing for the ideal and idealization of the loathsome.

That they are willing to hand children over to such as these, indeed to help and encourage them to have children, is a sufficient indictment of their claim to empathy and benevolence.

Tuesday, August 21, 2018

Donald Trump complained Monday that he was "not thrilled," with the Federal Reserve raising interest rates:

"WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump said on Monday he was 'not thrilled' with the Federal Reserve under his own appointee, Chairman Jerome Powell, for raising interest rates and said the U.S. central bank should do more to help him to boost the economy."

Trump also pined for cheaper money in private remarks to rich mega donors at a fundraiser on Long Island this past Friday.

Fed chairman Jerome Powell and the Federal Open Market Committee has raised interest rates five times so far during Trump’s administration, including two times this year.

At best it's yet more proof– on top of tariffs that have driven up raw steel prices 25 percent and touched off a trade war that has cost American farmers billions in lost business– that the self-styled champion of American labor, the Washington outsider who promised he would drain the swamp and Make America Great Again– is woefully economically illiterate.

At worst it reveals whose interests Donald Trump is really fighting for in Washington– the moneyed elite, who make their vast fortunes off of the free flow of cheap money from the Federal Reserve Bank, and the resulting devaluation of the U.S. dollar that has historically stolen more than 75 percent of the average American workers' earnings through price inflation over their lifetime, and redistributed that wealth to the parasitic banking class.

Just how low do interest rates have to be for Donald Trump to be happy with how much money the banks are stealing from the rest of America? They're already functionally negative.

Even downstream from the source of new money at the Federal Reserve, the lending divisions of major automobile manufacturers are actually paying people to borrow their money, with $1000 cash rebates on top of zero interest financing of the second biggest expense in most household budgets for five years.

American consumers thoroughly brainwashed by a decades long, sustained campaign of quite deliberate and deft psychological manipulation through marketing, eagerly participate in the madness, seeing these massively depreciating "assets" with shiny paint as status symbols, and believe they have to go into debt to a bank for five years to be esteemed by themselves and I guess people they meet getting out of their car in parking lots.

But you can hardly blame them, as the cheap lending is one of the only ways they can get the money back that's stolen from them when they save or spend it instead of borrowing it.

This insanely artificially low interest rate economy and culture, with its massive currency devaluation has created an economy based on debt and financial slavery, not investment and financial freedom. This is a path many governments and banking systems have taken before, and while it's a longer road for us to travel in America because there's more wealth to steal here, at the end of the road is always hyperinflation and a currency crisis.

As in the Zimbabwe Dollar. As in the Venezuelan Bolívar. As in the Germany Mark. As in the Hungarian Pengő. As in the Yugoslav Dinar. As in the Greek Euro. And don't think it can't happen in America. As in the stagflation of the 1970s.

Gary Johnson supporters are putting together a Labor Day "Money Bomb," an online campaign fundraiser that collects donations in one day en masse to support Johnson's 2018 Senate campaign in New Mexico and draw earned media attention.

The hope is ostensibly to make Gary Johnson a very real contender for the U.S. Senate this November and make a strong showing of national support for the Libertarian Party's most credible ever candidate for the most winnable federal office in the LP's history, in what the Money Bomb website calls "The Best Opportunity The Libertarian Party Has Ever Had," noting:

"Gary Johnson still enjoys very high name recognition, credibility, and popularity in New Mexico. This 2018 U.S. Senate race with Gary Johnson as the Libertarian candidate is the most winnable federal election opportunity the Libertarian Party has ever had!

If there was ever a time to give money to a Libertarian Party cause, if there was ever a chance to establish a beachhead for the LP in the swampland of Washington D.C., this is it!"

To gather momentum toward the target date of Labor Day on September 3rd, the Money Bomb organizers are asking for pledges and is keeping a tally of pledge totals and amounts at GaryJohnsonMoneyBomb.com.

The first notable use of the Internet to raise mass donations was by Howard Dean's online savvy, antiwar campaign for president in 2004, but Ron Paul supporters took at to an entirely new level in 2007, coining the term "money bomb" for a single day of online fundraising to focus nationwide support for presidential candidate Ron Paul into a single, remarkable point of impressive and relevant electioneering.

Money Bomb supporters used viral advertising and social media to make the effort an historical, record-setting success.

On November 5th of that year (Guy Fawkes day) 35,000 donors raised $4.2 million in one day, with an average donation amount of $120, though the median donation amount was likely smaller with a few donors maxing out the FEC limit of $2,700 per candidate per election and raising that average.

On December 16th (the anniversary of the 1773 Boston Tea Party), a second Ron Paul money bomb raised over $6 million in one day for his presidential campaign.

That quarter Ron Paul, the limited government, antiwar, constitutionalist candidate, out raised every other presidential contender, greatly amplifying his message.

In 2010, even though Rand Paul's money bomb fell short of his campaign's $400,000 fundraising goal, raising instead, a still-impressive $258,000 in two days, it was enough to overwhelm his opposition and propel the Bowling Green, KY eye surgeon to victory on election day and a seat in the U.S. Senate.

This year, the Gary Johnson Labor Day Money Bomb, doesn't currently have a goal amount on its website, but notes that political donations stretch farther in smaller states like New Mexico:

"What makes this opportunity even sweeter, is that New Mexico is a very affordable state to run a Senate campaign in, where the Libertarian Party member's dollar will stretch much farther than it could against the two party system's billion dollar presidential campaigns, and races in expensive states like California or Texas.

But New Mexico has two Senate seats, just like every other state, and Gary Johnson will get just as much speaking time as any other Senator."

The money bomb's organizer has remained anonymous, signing the one page pledge site, "An American Guesser."